Jan 11 2010
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse is a documentary about the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Coppola fired his lead actor after several weeks of shooting, his replacement lead actor had a heart attack half way through the 238-day shoot, hurricanes destroyed his sets, army helicopters were called away in the middle [...]
Jan 08 2010
Anvil! The Story of Anvil is in the same class as The King of Kong. It’s a documentary that tells an entertaining and touching story about a subject that most viewers probably would never care about but will once they get to know the people in it. I laughed out loud through much of [...]
Jan 04 2010
I went to my local multiplex movie theatre probably less than 20 times in 2009. Not many interesting movies come to Newfoundland, mostly just blockbusters and dumb movies like Did You Hear About the Morgans, which usually aren’t worth the pain of a trip to the mall. I can pick 5 movies I saw in [...]
Dec 27 2009
Food, Inc. is a documentary film that addresses the problems of industrial food production. Nobody wants to see how hot dogs are made, but you don’t want to see how factory farm crops are grown either. We’re gradually making ourselves sick with this crap (which includes meats, fruits, vegetables and just about everything sold [...]
Dec 17 2009
I have a Friday matinee ticket to see James Cameron’s new 3-D epic science fiction movie, Avatar. I’ll update this post afterwards if I’m impressed with what I see.
Dec 16 2009
I’m not sure how it happened this way, but I recently watched Citizen Kane for the first time in about 5 years and was in awe of the whole damn thing. I was pretty much transfixed from the first frame to the last. Every 30 minutes or so I had to pause the [...]
Dec 15 2009
He excludes Avatar, Invictus and The Lovely Bones because he hasn’t seen them yet, and he wants to watch some movies like District 9 again before he makes up his mind. But so far the list of his favourite 2009 movies begins with the new Star Trek movie as #1.
I will eventually write a gushing [...]
Dec 11 2009
The 5-hour version of Fanny and Alexander, not the meagre 3-hour theatrical cut. It’s a “slow paced human drama told with an artisan’s voice,” one that isn’t depressing or disturbing — which is a welcomed change for an Ingmar Bergman film.
The story focuses on the lives of a large affluent family in Sweden, particularly [...]
